Sony Pictures Hacked – Studio-Staff Computers Hacked by Hackers

Sony Pictures appears to be hacked once again by cyber criminals, but this time not PlayStation but Sony Pictures Entertainment – the company’s television production and distribution unit got hacked.

According to reports, the corporate computers of Sony Pictures in New York and around the world were infiltrated by a hacker, displaying a weird skeleton and a threatening message that reads:

“Hacked By #GOP Warning: We’ve already warned you, and this is just a beginning. We continue till our request be met. We’ve obtained all your internal data, including your secrets and top secrets. If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world. Determine what will you do till November the 24th, 11:00 PM (GMT).”

News broke out after a guy, who claimed to be a ex Sony staff, posted defacement image on Reddit forum. A notorious Hackers group named as #GOP (Guardians of Peace) claimed the responsibility for defacing the staff computers at Sony Pictures, and apparently stolen reams of corporate data as well.

Reports also claims that the notorious hacker group had also gained access to dozens of the company’s Social Microblogging site Twitter accounts linked to movies such as Stomp The Yard, Soul Surfer, and Starship Troopers, but the company has recovered the accounts.

A source from Sony Pictures has anonymously confirmed that the hack and the defacement image that have appeared on Sony’s Staff computers inside Sony Pictures are real. They said that “a single server was compromised and the attack was spread from there.”

The hacker group GOP leaked a large ZIP file containing a list of filenames of a number of documents pertaining to Sony Pictures financial records along with private keys and passwords for access to their servers. They lso leaked a text file that contains the last 10 recently used passwords at Sony.

The defacement message mentions some “demands” that must be met by November 24th at 11:00PM GMT or else the files named will be released. While the main motives behind the atatck are still not clear, but the hackers group says that they will expose more details publicly if their demands were not fulfilled by them.

According to Sony Pictures, their information-technology departments have instructed all the employees to shut down their computers and disable Wi-Fi on all mobile devices. Company hasn’t confirmed the security break yet, instead saying it was investigating “an IT matter” in a statement.